shards of End Of Year debris

A bit of time-traveling was necessary to post this blog, as it just didn’t fit with the rest of the politicised blogs of 11/12/2010, and it fitted better amongst the more self-pitying blogs around 11/12/2009. So, I have sent this blog back one year, for the sake of the continuity of the blog and also because I am ashamed to still be the wreck that I am from time to time; there seems to be an expectation to grow out of discontent, leave it in youth as we begin our professional lives – I have achieved neither. So, lets pretend that this is 2009 and not 2010.

I am about to receive many “you need to stop thinking like this, it is possible you know!” reactions, to which I want to say “I can’t understand how you cannot see how things are!”.
I feel like I’m slipping into one of my spells again, where bitter reality refuses to be pushed to the back of my mind.

At points of jubilation I see togetherness. In times of depression – a.k.a clarity- I know I’m alone and that nobody understands me.

Where others see choice I see inevitability.

The only real change cannot come from within, which is what others don’t seem to be able to accept when I tell them that I really don’t know how to change my life. If the outside is what destroys the inside, only a outside change can change the inside; hence my increasing politicisation.

I’ve gone past the stage of telling people that I’m unhappy – there is no longer anything gained from doing so.

Conversation now has become a task of keeping the ball rolling; because I have no appreciation for much in life for longs periods of time, I must keep a conversation rolling, usually with many diversions to jokes/constant randomness – a foil for the emptiness of the real me not to revealed.

After all the cries of “I am an individual” against the collectivism of 20th century state socialism, it is under this world of free market capitalism, which proclaims to endorse individualism, where I like an alien reject.

The phrase “smile and the whole world smiles” is the most evil phrase to someone who battles against the mental landslip into depression. It says “your unhappiness is so selfish, you make others around you unhappy, you should be ashamed of yourself, you should sort yourself out!” Who on their right mind would say this to a physically sick person? Tune in! depression’s real and it’s growing.

You know that what makes you feel this way is truth, utter truth. To forge a personality which could switch off from this and also feel the warm glow of happiness, would mean having to erase all history in your mind; to have the mind wiped clean like a computer disk.

Unless a person, who genuinely means well, can’t come round to accept that to begin to understand your mental illness they need a societal standpoint and a political approach, then they will never understand you, and will continue to look bemused and irritated when you cannot take on board the plans and tips they prescribe, like pill packets to you. When you say you “see no hope” and they look at you as if you are a foolish child who is using some song lyrics he’s/she’s remembered from a sad song, you know that talking about your state of mind to those around you is now a lost cause. Thus, I do not speak at all at times. I sit there listening to other peoples’ conversations, feeling compressed as if my whole body was sucking a lemon, to the point where I can’t help thinking “really, what is the point of these conversations you are having!?”. Obviously I know this to be a completely irrational state of thinking (when I am in states of mind that search for real optimism I know that everything has meaning) and this knowledge further condemns me to an urge to just give up and crawl into my box room.

However, many people who know me well really do question whether it is down to what I focus on in life which causes the depression. But is the other way around: my depression is what causes me to focus on these things; the world as it is (which I’d have had to have been an hermit not to have witnessed) caused the illness, and attempting to unravel it, through learning/understanding and defiant reaction, is the only foreseeable, and justifiable (once one realises that they are part of an epidemic of mental illness, not just a anomaly) way forward.
My illness was not curable by blinding myself to the increasing social decay, climate change and all the other issues coming to a head in the 21st century. It isn’t curable/preventable in this sick society full stop. I know this to be the truth. This is why I really do not know how people expect me to eradicate this mind set.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

About John Ledger

A visual Artist, eternal meanderer and obsessive self-reflector by nature, who can’t help but try to interpret everything from within the tide of society. His works predominantly take the form of large scale ballpoint pen landscape drawings and map-making as social/psychological note-making. They are slowly-accumulating responses to crises inflicted upon the self in the perplexing, fearful, empty, and often personality-erasing human world.